Character Encoding

I have an Apache/Tomcat/MySql site that has mix of English and Turkish content. When someone views the site, some of the Turkish characters are not displaying properly. I tried adding the following to all pages:

<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">

But for some reason browsers are auto-detecting the site as "Western" or "ISO-8859-1" even though when I go to other sites that suport the Turkish character set and that also use the same meta tag (e.g., http://www.google.com/intl/tr/) they are auto-detected as "Unicode" or "UTF-8". Is there a way to set the character encoding at the http server or app server level?